Times-22/05/2007

TBC, (Times)

"For the Lebanese army commanders deployed outside a sprawling refugee camp north of Beirut, the situation is dangerous and desperately confused. That is exactly as their enemy intended. The army is seeking to destroy militant Islamist cells within the camp while abiding by a longstanding deal not to enter it. Civilian casualties are an inevitable result, and the more they mount, the more public backing for the task at hand is likely to erode. Yet the violence that has claimed at least seventy lives in two days is part of a larger power struggle whose outlines are clear: by destabilising its neighbour, Syria is seeking to force the international community to drop its efforts to hold Damascus to account for the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, two years ago. This is state-sponsored blackmail. It must not prevail.

The running battles triggered by a raid on suspected bank robbers on Sunday evening already rank as Lebanon's worst internal violence since the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Yet a return to civil war is not the immediate risk faced by the vulnerable Government of the current Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora. Rather, he must confront a sustained effort, backed by Syria and fronted by the al-Qaeda offshoot known as Fatah al-Islam, to reverse the humiliating withdrawal forced on Damascus after the still-unsolved murder of Mr Hariri in 2005. Initial investigations indicate high-level Syrian involvement in the killing. But, far from cooperating with UN moves to establish an international tribunal to hear the case, Damascus has given repeated warnings that such a tribunal would inflame radical minorities in Lebanon's semi-permanent Palestinian refugee camps. It is now ensuring that those warnings come true."

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